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THE INTERNET’S ENGLISH TEACHER: Did Taylor Swift “girlboss too close to the sun?”
Taylor Swift denominates herself an “English teacher” and the Swifties across the world eat it up. To me, this seems like a…
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Making Room for Occasional Cheese Dip: A review of “A Confederacy of Dunces”
A review of A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Grove Press, 1994. I was first introduced to A Confederacy of…
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The Tragedy of the Edmund Fitzgerald
A review of The Gales of November by John Bacon. Norton & Company, 2025. Everyone knows about the tragic sinking of the…
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Taming the Tomboy: The “Old-Fashioned Girl” books of my childhood, and what they taught me about womanhood, femininity, and growing up
I went through my American Girl phase between fourth and fifth grade, and read through piles of the books. This obsession culminated…
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What to Read if You Loved: Game of Thrones
It’s a canon event for all readers: you start a show not thinking much of it, end up binging it all the…
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A Worthy Sequel or Just A Cash Grab?
A review of The Housemaid’s Secret, by Freida McFadden. Bookouture, 2023. I broke one of the core values of book reviewing and…
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The Duality of Humanity in East of Eden
A review of East of Eden, by John Steinbeck. Penguin Books, 1952. John Steinbeck is a household name for a reason. He…
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Goblets, Daggers, and Jousts – My First Time at a Renaissance Festival
I grew up enamored by fantasy worlds. Film, books, and even music would often take me on all sorts of adventures by…
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Forrest Frank’s Concert Brings Spirit to the Stage in St. Louis
A review of Forrest Frank’s “The Jesus Generation” concert on July 25th, 2026, St. Louis, Missouri On July 25th, my mom, brother…
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Honing Confidence in Writing-My Experience With ENG 382
From a young age I always liked to read. I did the reading contests every summer at my local library, read at…
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Guysha Guy’s “The Persistence of Memory”
This piece was written in April of 2026 Memory sometimes feels like a melting clock. We remember, but from time to time,…
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Constraint and Clarity: Writing Poetry Within a Moving Medium
In the later part of 2022, I found myself living just outside the Quad Cities in Illinois, coping with the aftermath of…
The Department of English at Western Illinois University